Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Superman presents a certain kind of challenge that minor
superheroes do not. That sentence describes an observation made by both the
writer and the villains of Grant Morrison's Seven
Soldiers. A writer can change the small facts of the Man of Steel's life,
place Superman in any of countless scenarios, put many words in his mouth, but the
character must stay true to certain established truths, and there are limits to
what a new story can get away with. A minor character, on the other hand, may
be molded and manipulated to a far greater extent. That is what motivated
Morrison to give the starring roles in his series to characters who had
appeared in DC Comics before, but whose prominence ranged from second-tier
(Zatanna) down to several tiers below that. Accordingly, Morrison was able to
redefine the characters substantially, changing two of them from men to women,
mutilating and killing another one, and so on.

The villains in the story, the murderous, gleefully corrupt
Sheeda from Earth's future also decide not to include the leading figures of
the Justice League in their plan. In a prequel printed in JLA Classified #1-3, the Sheeda attempt a frontal assault on the
year 2005 and it does not go well. Neh-Buh-Loh, one of the Sheeda's warriors,
stands atop a tall building and dares Earth to send its "world's
finest" champions to fall at his feet, whereupon Superman flies out of the
sky and effortlessly punches out Neh-Buh-Loh twice, unfazed by the villain's
best blow. In response, the Sheeda retreat, with Neh-Buh-Loh warning "I
have seen enough… I have tested my prey… When next my people come, it will be
as whispers of death, unseen… goodbye, Superman…" This is, indeed, similar
to the way Morrison kept the DC's heavy hitters out of his lineup, and it is more
than that: Planned less than three years after the September 11 attacks, Seven Soldiers is the story of how a
despicable enemy bent on the destruction of our civilization decides to strike by
surprise in New York, wreaking havoc on the island of Manhattan. Sound familiar?

Seven Soldiers is
thus a parable for our times, utilizing seven… actually, quite a bit more than
seven… of DC's minor characters. The sprawling story is set in the DCU, uses
DCU conventions, began with a prequel involving the DC's biggest stars, and has
a menace that threatens the DC Universe, but with its focus on minor
characters, was able to take risks that a series starring flagship characters could
not. Morrison used that freedom with virtuoso skill, and crafted, in Seven Soldiers, one of the finest works
that DC has ever published.

The structure is without an obvious peer. Morrison told the
story in 30 issues consisting of single issues (Seven Soldiers #0 and #1) that bookend seven miniseries of four
issues each. A reader may like one of these miniseries and dislike another, or
like five and dislike two… but is likely to admire most of them and love some.
Any of these miniseries can be read or re-read alone, but they are intertwined,
and they work together to tell the story of one existential threat to the world.

Seven Soldiers and
its various prequels present seven teams of seven: The original Seven Soldiers
(1941), a Silver Age revival including Spider instead of Green Arrow, the
Ultramarine Corps and the JLA in Morrison's JLA
Confidential story, a lineup that fights and dies in Seven Soldiers #0, the Newsboy Army seen in flashbacks, and the
lineup that defeats the Sheeda in Seven
Soldiers #1. A shadowy group called the Time Tailors make an eighth group
of seven – or group of eight – the number in these groups is also sometimes
six, which is bad luck and portends defeat.

The fundamental inspiration for this series goes back to
Mort Weisinger's introduction of the Seven Soldiers of Victory in Leading Comics #1, in 1941, when the
seven heroes from five solo features joined forces to fight a master criminal
named The Hand. A 1972 story in JLA
#100-102 scripted by Len Wein revived the Seven Soldiers in a new battle
against their first enemy, who, aided by a cosmic threat named the Nebula Man,
made himself into a powerful force named the Iron Hand. Morrison pays homage to
the original team by basing several members of his two lineups of Seven
Soldiers upon the originals or their legacies. To complete the lineups, he uses
or invents characters whose origins, in almost all cases, can be traced to
other Golden Age characters or Jack Kirby inventions:

Seven Soldiers of
Victory, 1941

Crimson Avenger

Shining Knight

The Vigilante

Green Arrow and Speedy

Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy

Seven Soldiers #0 team (Golden Age inspirations)

Vigilante (himself)

Gimmix (Star Spangled Kid's stepniece)

The Whip (The Whip's granddaughter)

I, Spyder (Spider's son)

Boy Blue (imitator)

Dyno-Mite Dan (imitator)

Bulleteer (imitator, not by choice)

Seven Soldiers #1 team (Golden Age inspirations)

Shining Knight (retcon of original Shining Knight, now a
woman)

Guardian (retcon of original)

Zatanna (daughter of Zatara)

Klarion (retcon of original)

Mister Miracle (successor to the original)

Bulleteer (imitator, not by choice)

Frankenstein (DC character adapted from the novel)

One immediately notices an overlap in the starring lineups –
as Zatanna says, "it's like there's mystery string holding everything
together." Greg "Vigilante" Saunders is a member of the original
and SS #0 lineups, while Bulleteer is
a member of the SS #0 lineup (though
absent) and the SS #1 lineup. But
there are also overlaps in the supporting casts. Many of these come from a
group of child crimefighters called the Newsboy Army (patterned closely on Jack
Kirby's Newsboy Legion). Their heyday was decades ago, but many of them survive
and surface throughout Seven Soldiers,
having aged enough that their reappearances as adults make the reveals of their
identity surprising. Another form of string holding things together are cameos
that the cast of one miniseries make in the others. This includes the stars,
the bystanders, and especially the villains.

Morrison's villains, as in several of his other works, arrive
via a time loop: From Earth's future, the Sheeda prey on their world's own
past, targeting the best and most prosperous eras, using evil magic and science
and mind control powers – tiny fairies who ride mosquitoes like winged horses,
and attach to a good person's spine in order to turn them bad. We see them
topple Camelot and make small raids on other times leading up to a full assault
on 2005 and the era of superheroes. They use a giant spider as bait to attract
one lineup of Seven Soldier to Miracle Mesa, Arizona, and then wipe out the
group that Vigilante had recruited for the purpose. Aware that they cannot
defeat the Justice League, the Sheeda plan a sneak attack on New York, and are
on guard watching out for any group of seven heroes who might organize to stop
them. Along the way, in the seven miniseries, we see how seven heroes – some of
them old, some new, and many of them very unlikely – take their places in the
battle to come.

Shining Knight is Ystina, a young woman posing as a male
knight named Justin, who sees her Camelot in the final stages of its fall to
the Sheeda. She enters their time machine, Castle Revolving, and in her escape,
inadvertently ends up in modern-day Los Angeles. Don Vincenzo, a mob boss, who
is one of the Newsboy Army grown up (and turned bad) ends up with Ystina's
winged horse, Vanguard. At the end of her miniseries, she is in combat with the
Sheeda queen, Gloriana Tenebrae, who does not fear Ystina because she is only
one, and prophecy says that seven will defeat the Sheeda.

Jake Jordan is a "big, tough" former police
officer who is haunted by a deadly mistake that he made on the job. He applies
for a job as a hero/journalist (a la Clark Kent?) with the Manhattan Guardian
newspaper, whose boss happens to be another of the Newsboy Army grown up (or,
to be precise – grown old, but not "up"). Donning a costume and
shield as the Manhattan Guardian, he soon finds himself fighting pirates who
live in the tunnels under the New York subway system, and ends his miniseries
protecting his boss from the Sheeda.

Zatanna is by far the most famous of the characters in this
series. A former member of the Justice League, she is psychologically broken
and lacks the confidence to use her spellcasting power. We see in flashbacks
that she has killed several people close to her in a mystic miscalculation, and
the guilt of her role in Identity Crisis
is also haunting her. She acquires a young sidekick named Misty, who is as
mysterious as her name indicates, and who proves to be, unwillingly, heir to
the Sheeda throne. Zatanna is being stalked by a magical villain named Zor, a
Golden Age villain powerful enough to challenge the Spectre ("he brags
that he brought the wrath of God to its white and wobbly knees," a feat he
achieved in More Fun Comics #55 way
back in 1940). Zatanna overcomes Zor with cleverness and boldness, so she and
Misty can prepare for their key roles in fighting the Sheeda.

Perhaps Morrison's greatest invention in Seven Soldiers is Limbo Town, the world
of Klarion the Witch Boy, where an isolated, underground community displaying
puritanical severity (and fashion) follows black magic instead of Christianity.
They are the Lost Colony of Jamestown, whose mysterious word
"Croatoan" scrawled on a tree is the name of their new god. In the
centuries since their disappearance, they have lived and bred underground after
an early generation was raped by the Sheeda king, Melmoth. In a stroke of
brilliance, Morrison concocts an army of zombie laborers who are the revived
ancestors of Limbo Town residents, called "grundies," and possessing
the general traits of longtime DC villain Solomon Grundy. Klarion, the
quintessential small-town boy dreaming of a larger world, escapes upwards from
Limbo Town to the subways of New York, where he almost meets the Guardian, and
then spends some time in the surface world, known as Blue Rafters to his
people, attracting the attention of his ancestor Melmoth, and setting the stage
for Klarion to join the battle against the Sheeda.

Mister Miracle, like the Guardian, is a Jack Kirby character
whom Morrison recast with an African American man instead of a white man. Shilo
Norman was a youth serving as a minor character in Kirby's original stories,
but in Seven Soldiers has grown up to
adopt the identity, not as a superhero, but as a super celebrity escape artist.
We see him at the top of his fame and renown, making his greatest escape ever
from a miniature black hole, before things start to go wrong. We learn, and
then he learns, that the people around him are the living embodiments of
Darkseid and his cronies, living on Earth in human bodies. Darkseid tries to
break Shilo Norman, but finds it more difficult than he imagined, and Shilo is
still intact, a few lifetimes in alternate timelines later, and ready to fight
Darkseid and his allies, the Sheeda.

Of all the Seven Soldiers, none is less enthusiastic about
being a superhero than Alix Harrower. At the age of 27, Alix found out the hard
way that her husband was living – at least in his own mind – a double, or
perhaps triple, life. His attempt to give himself superpowers cost him all
three of those lives, and gave Alix a super-hard metallic coating that she
didn't want and couldn't undo. Thus, her husband's dream of imitating the
Golden Age's Bulletman and Bulletgirl left her an unhappy widow who had no
choice, medically, financially, or spiritually, but to begin a new existence as
Bulleteer. As her miniseries ends, she is driving with her husband's psychotic
cyber-girlfriend, ostensibly to a hospital, but unbeknownst to her, right into
the middle of the battle with the Sheeda.

Frankenstein – or rather, Frankenstein's monster – is a
cultural icon greatly predating superheroes. Morrison's version of
Frankenstein, however, is a gun-toting badass who has been fighting crime for
over a century, and is soon recruited by S.H.A.D.E. to fight as a government
operative. On Mars, Frankenstein learns that he is immortal because his blood
contains the essence of Lord Melmoth, which makes him the third major character
in the story to owe his life to that villain. Less than grateful to Melmoth, Frankenstein
leaves him to be eaten by monsters and excreted, still sentient, as their dung.
Then, sent by S.H.A.D.E. one billion years into the future, he attacks the
Sheeda capital and goes into the series finale mid-battle with Gloriana
Tenebrae.

Seven Soldiers
borrows several elements from Wein's JLA
#100-102, including the fact that someone among the heroes must die at the end
– a promo line echoed at the end of each miniseries' issue #4. In Wein's story,
Crimson Avenger's sidekick Wing had died in the past and Red Tornado dies in
the present. In Morrison's epic, it's Mister Miracle who dies, being summarily
executed by Boss Dark Side after giving his life to rescue the ancient
superhero Aurakles – a clever fusion on Morrison's part of the cosmic being
Oracle from Wein's story (Oracle being highly reminiscent of Marvel Comics' The
Watcher) and Greek mythology's Hercules. Fortunately, being the greatest escape
artist ever, Shilo Norman escapes from the grave just as readily as he did from
the black hole, and he's alive again in Final
Crisis; it fits his showman shtick that we have no idea how he performed
either of those impossible escapes.

In the battle of Manhattan, every member of the Seven
Soldiers plus an ally or two plays his or her part, even though they never meet
together as a group of seven in one place and one time, which is what allows
them to avoid being detected as a threat by the Sheeda. And this is the
essential, ironic, and heroic triumph of the story: Just as the Sheeda can
attack our civilization so effectively because they launch a sneak attack and
thereby avoid the Justice League, so the Seven Soldiers can attack the Sheeda
so effectively, because the Seven Soldiers launch a sneak counterattack against
them! In the years soon after September 11, this is nice spiritual salve for
having, ourselves, suffered a sneak attack.

The finale is beautiful, chaotic choreography. Some of the
Seven Soldiers have weapons drawn, Zatanna casts a spell to unite their
actions, many spring into action though they have little idea what they are
doing, and finally, Bulleteer is a
weapon, and the Sheeda are overthrown, saving the DCU from them, for now.
Darkseid skulks away to launch the threat in Final Crisis, which preserves the essential dynamic that runs
through Seven Soldiers – nothing is
ever really over, and a mystery string unites one team and one battle and one
enemy to the next. The Seven Soldiers move on, the Sheeda move on (now led by
Klarion), and the stage is set for the next big story. Morrison gave his Mister
Miracle and Frankenstein significant supporting roles in Final Crisis, and Zatanna retains her stature as a fan favorite,
but otherwise, the Seven Soldiers have remained obscure.

The story has a higher level, seen at its beginning and end
as well as in the Zatanna and Guardian miniseries. As a means of
explaining the mystery string that ties everything together, Morrison shows us
a group of seven Time Tailors, the Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp. These are
comic book writers, and putting the writers themselves into the story is
something Morrison has done in Animal Man
and elsewhere. Though they all look alike – somewhat like Morrison himself – they
represent all the writers over the years, certainly including Len Wein, Jerry
Siegel, Mort Weisinger, and all the rest who number far more than seven. Morrison
shows the Time Tailors doing what writers usually do – using their godlike
powers to change characters, often to the characters' dismay. They make I,
Spyder more interesting for this story, but doom him to an unpleasant fate.
They ruin the Newsboy Army, giving them adult vices and killing most of them
off. Zatanna manages to pop out of the story to interact with them directly,
which helps her orient correctly for her place in the final battle, and they
reward her by disposing cruelly of Zor in the final issue – as it is explained
that Zor's vast powers are because he is really one of them, a Time Tailor who
exists in the story itself.

Seven Soldiers is
a triumph because Morrison capitalizes on its characters' statures as
characters that are interesting within the DCU, but are obscure enough that he
could do just about whatever he wanted with them. He ties Golden Age stories
together with current-day big-time events and works his post-modernist magic
into a sprawling 30-issue epic that flies in many different directions before
all coming together at the end. Most of these characters are unlikely to
headline again on a front cover anytime soon, if ever, and seen in that
respect, Seven Soldiers is an epic
and a mini-universe that had a definite beginning, middle, and end and is now
over and done with. It showed that a respectably large audience will pay
attention to obscure characters if their story is handled with care, even if
that is not a potential that has not been realized again in the decade since Seven Soldiers ended.